TV, Films, Games and Comics is what I do

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Monthly Archives: February 2014

From what I have learned over the past month regarding motion graphics and compositing is that what you see on screen is not where it is filmed. A lot of television shows and films manage to create a whole new world with computers that give the audience a feel of what the setting is like. For instance in shows like Boardwalk Empire they were able to create massive buildings and ships with just a few images and a time in front of a monitor in just a few hours whereas say forty years ago to create something like a large ship they would probably got a ship from somewhere just to use for that amount of screen time, but nowadays it would be a green screen and computer generated imagery to trick the audience to believe that it is real. In films they have a larger budget so that means that they can have more spectacular sets that they can create, for example in the film Wolf on Wall Street they either motion graphed a lion to walk through a office bull pen or they filmed a lion walking behind a screen and then layered the video over the top to make the audience believe that there was a lion in the bull pen.

I also believe that in the past few decades I believe that having skills in After Effects and Photoshop nowadays is a good thing to have as it is an easy way to edit large styled effects onto a video in the case of After Effects or an image in the case of Photoshop. For instance it is easy to create an explosion, with the right type of explosion effects, to make the audience believe that it was a real explosion and that something got destroyed instead of a company spending loads on pyrotechnics that would have also take time to set up on location. But given the fact that we as a class have only had a few weeks to learn how to edit on AE we have done we have progressed, I believe really well with a bit of fine tuning any projects that we have coming up or if we were to get the software in the future would be able to make really good quality videos.

For typography the best type of font can make a product the most attractive towards the audience. For instance the typography for the film The Great Gatsby uses the same type of font that was used for signs in the richer parts of New York and the more similar one that we would use would be Broadway.

When it comes to coming up with ideas for producing work a good way to put them down onto a form where people could decide on what would happen in the next stage of production would to be creating mood boards where ideas from images and words. One of the easiest ways to do this would be either a PowerPoint slide or Photoshop, depending on which you would find more suiting to use and then start creating the ideas from there. I find that using Photoshop is better because you can sort the images out easier to where you want them to be.

Using After Effects I’ve been thinking that it has been really productive in creating edits on different projects like creating muzzle flashes on a gun or placing a Death Star into the ending on Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory and having the glass elevator to blow up. By doing this type of effects editing it gives us a good chance to see what professionals do when they do the big Hollywood blockbusters. But recently we explored a new type of 3D editing which I think is a cool type of editing that give the illusion of a 2D image being 3D. This is also a technique has been modernised because it is used with documentaries and people hate to see a still image on television so with this illusion people seem more intrigued. I believe that with learning the correct techniques that I have learned I should be able to adapt them well to my five minute film projects as I will be using a teleporter effect.